Designated Love Interest: If you say that two characters are in love, don't make them hate or be apathetic to each other, actually go out of your way to make them love each other. Otherwise it just feels contrived.

Designated Villain: Having your villain Pet the Dog or come off as harmless and still expecting your audience to see him as a monster just because you say he is doesn't usually work, and makes your antagonist petty. If you want a lighter villain, an Anti-Villain or Hero Antagonist will usually work better than trying to gloss over the redeeming aspects of your character.

Distress Ball: Don't have a character get kidnapped for no good reason.

Draco in Leather Pants: Have an acceptable reason for making a truly evil character suddenly be nice. "He or she is hot!" will not do.

Dull Surprise: Have your characters emote during events that would make a real person do so.

Failure Hero: While having the hero lose from time to time adds some realism to the hero and drama to the story, if they lose every single fight or mission, not only will it destroy any and all tension, but the reader will feel bad for relating with the hero.

Faux Action Girl: If you say that a girl is strong, then make her strong. If said Action Girl comes off as too weak, the audience will begin to hate her.

Hero Ball: Heroes are expected to make bad decisions every now and then, but when they directly aid the villains, it becomes this trope.

Jerk Sue: Having a character be a complete Jerkass who gets away with it just because the author designates them as such and says you should support them does not make for a strong character, and is more likely going to turn out be a case of Creator's Pet, and often The Scrappy. Also, it tends to look like a half-assed effort when the author just throws in some secondary throw-away detail in an attempt to make you feel sorry for the character and expect you to not get upset when they behave like a jerk for no other reason than they feel like it at the time.

Out of Character: Moments when the character does something that he wouldn't normally do without any justification.

Positive Discrimination: Don't make the female or minority characters better than the others simply because they are minorities, and don't make the male characters incompetent simply because they are males.

Villain Sue: A flawless, invincible villain who never loses at anything makes for a boring story just as much as an ordinary Mary Sue.

Wangst: Make your characters react realistically to setbacks or tragic events. Too much angst makes them unrealistic and annoying.

Wimpification: Stripping the action, common sense, and characterization from a male character to add Wangst and gender stereotypes applied to females is a good way to piss off many of the audience, including but not limited to feminists and actual gay or bisexual men.

Gratuitous Rape: Rape is an incredibly grave subject matter. Don't shoehorn in a rape scene just for shock value.

Idiot Plot: Unless it's part of their character, the plot should not be forced to move forward solely by people making stupid decisions.

It Gets Better: Just as the viewer shouldn't demand the work to end already as with Ending Fatigue, they shouldn't be forced to sit through hours of exposition or padding to get to the actual plot.

Just Eat Gilligan: If there's an obvious solution to the problem(s) that drives the story, you would think the characters would go for it rather than ignoring it.

Kudzu Plot: It's fine to have a dozen different story threads at once, but you have to be able to tie them together. If they go off into infinity without ever being tied, who's going to care about any of them? The pieces of your Jigsaw Puzzle Plot have to fit.

Lost in Medias Res: If there's not enough exposition when starting out In Medias Res, the viewers will feel completely lost and lose interest in the story.

Author Filibuster: The reader/viewer/player/etc is (theoretically) interested in the plot. Stopping it so that you can talk about something that's important to you will only make them less interested in what you're writing.

"Blind Idiot" Translation: When you translate the works transformed appropriately.Translation When translating a work, translate it properly.

Gratuitous English: Randomly popping in meaningless English words that you don't know the meaning of is a bad idea. If you want to write in English, know the meaning of your English and make sure it's grammatically correct.

Gratuitous Japanese: It's generally not a good idea to use random bits of Japanese unless you're a fluent speaker, lest you come across as pandering to Occidental Otaku. Either write in idiomatic Japanese and learn how to properly pronounce it if you need to, or just write in your native language.

No Punctuation Period: Run-on sentences make a story much harder to read especially when there should be pauses yet there is no possible way of defining when they would appear and can usually be avoided.

Said Bookism: A form of Purple Prose. Using fancy substitutes for the word "said" in the fear that the dialogue doesn't speak for itself will cause people to foucs less on your work and more on the words used.

Shallow Parody: Do not spoof what you're spoofing unless you know well about what you're spoofing.

Show, Don't Tell: Telling the reader that something is X, rather than showing it's X is a sign of laziness on the author's part.

Strawman Has a Point: If you can't even attack strawmen without being defeated, you may need a new profession.

Translation Train Wreck: Bed telephones not particle via misunderstand through reverses all reeling meats inside dolphin non fluffy. Translation Bad translations that are impossible to understand and removes any real meaning from the dialogue are not favorable.

We're Still Relevant, Dammit: When trying to keep Long Runners up to date, throwing in recent pop culture references and fads won't help at all. Instead it just comes off as stupid, instantly dated, and possibly even the sign of a Dork Age.

Examples Are Not Recent: When writing an example, avoid using the word "recent." What's considered recent now won't be in a couple of years. It just makes more trouble for other tropers to edit out the word "recent" once it isn't recent anymore. Act as if every work that was ever published came out several years ago.

Linking to an Article Within the Article: Having a link on a page that leads to the exact same page is completely pointless and redundant. It's even worse if the link is potholed or if a redirect is used, as this can trick the reader into wasting their time clicking on it and thinking they're going somewhere when they really aren't.

Square Peg Round Trope: Make sure that the example that you want to add fully fits the trope. If it's "not really an example", then it's not really an example, and it shouldn't be added.

This Troper: Writing about oneself in a Main wiki article. The goal is to make Main articles sound like a single person is editing the article, not multiple people. Besides, personal comments just clog up the articles.

Thread Mode: Don't clog up a trope entry just because you don't understand why it's there.

Type Labels Are Not Examples: Any relevant context needed to explain the example should be given in the example itself. Don't simply label it "type X" and force the reader to open a separate page just so they can understand what it means.

Weblinks Are Not Examples: If one has a trope example, one should write it down, in adequate detail, where it is relevant, not rely on a URL link to some other page to explain what it is.

Word Cruft: When writing an example, just stick to writing the example and try to avoid saying useless things that don't need to be said.

Disappointing Last Level: Be sure players still have interest in finishing your game by the time they reach the final level.

Fake Balance: Make sure to have proper balance in your game, otherwise players will hate something/someone for non-story reasons.

Fake Difficulty: If you're going to make a game difficult, make it fair. Similarly, the game's difficulty should not come from artificial/nonsensical/completely arbitrary means or a painfully obvious cheating AI.

Painful Rhyme: Don't force rhymes. If something doesn't rhyme, you can make a non-rhyming song that can be just as good as a rhyming one, or try to find rhyming words that both describe what you want and rhyme.

Something Something Leonard Bernstein: Depending on your genre, this might actually be workable. But in anything requiring clear vocals, this is automatically bad, and even in more permissive genres overly relying on it is often a bad idea.

Vocal Range Exceeded: Don't write things your singer can't sing, and if you're the singer as well as the writer, be realistic about your range and capabilities.note A common mistake here is writing for the highest ranges such as pure soprano and alto. Especially among male singers, the capability to reach these ranges is astonishingly rare (male singers will usually fall somewhere between tenor and baritone on average), and even most female singers fall short of being capable of pure soprano or alto voice, and a singer who is incapable of such and tries anyway will likely sound falsetto and possibly damage their vocal cords. If in doubt, write for the lower ranges and modify higher.

Unclassified

Canon Defilement: People who are reading your Fan Fic probably enjoy the show for what it is. Not for what you would like it to be. Seeing beloved characters mangled into whatever form you desire is probably going to cut down on your audience, unless you're Neil Gaimannote And even he shows a great deal of respect for Canon while mangling it.

Cliché Storm: Be original, or at least try to. Don't steal overused ideas from other works.

Narm (when caused by the writing): Make your dramatic/climactic scenes convincing, not cheesy. Don't go over-the-top. Make it realistic. Think about how a person in Real Life would behave in the situation.

Parody Retcon: If you're setting out to make a parody or a satire, announce that from the outset. People are unlikely to believe you if you only claim that your work was intended as such after the fact.

Shipping Bed Death: When not handled properly, a pairing becoming canon can kill the audience's interest in the story and/or characters.

Strangled by the Red String: People going directly from being strangers to being genuinely in love is not very realistic or satisfying to watch. If you're going to make two characters fall in love with each other, try to take it slow.

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